How I did with my 2024 goals

 My goals for 2024 were

• Write 80k words
• Finish writing 3 books
• Edit 1 book

I will admit I did not do well with my goals for this year. I only got about 60k words written and I only finished writing one book this year but I did manage to rewrite one of my old books in preparation for my contract with that book ending next year (Hinovel book) and the one book I finished which I wrote the most words on this year the first round of edits was completed. 

2024 was not the year I expected it to be but it has opened doors for 2025 which I am excited about but it does mean that I have set my goals a little too high for next year but we will see what that brings.

 

My 2025 writing goals are as follows. 

• Write 100k words
• Write three books
• Edit two books
• Publish two book 

How I did with my 2023 writing goals

 My goals for 2023 were 

• write 100,000 words
• Publish all of my hybrid series
• Finish writing all unfinished books
• Edit 2 books 

How I did?

I managed to publish all of my hybrid series within the first month of 2023, I managed to write the only unfinished book I had sitting there waiting to be written and managed to edit it all by June 2023. I then started writing and editing another book which I just finished in November 2023. 

I didn’t manage to write 100k words I only hit 78k but that’s still good enough to me. 

How I did with my 2022 goals

 

This year my writing goals were to

• Write 100k words

• Finish editing endometriosis book
• Publish endometriosis book traditionally 

I managed to finish editing my endometriosis book while I didn’t publish it. Traditionally, I did self publish it this year I didn’t write 100,000 words that was a bit much with the baby, but I did manage to write close to 80,000 words.

How did you do with your writing goals this year?

My typical writing routine

 

Now that I have a child to also take care of my typical writing routine has changed a lot very quickly and while I’m still trying to juggle everything I almost have it down packed. 

Each week I focus on a different thing but I only ever have two books on the go. 

One week I will be editing one book and the next week I am writing a different book but I now refuse to change which book I’m writing or editing until the previous book is done. 

If I get writers block I take a week off and then the next week I look into agents and a plan of how to publish before diving back into editing. 

I try and write or edit for thirty minutes a day, typically this is once baby goes to sleep before I follow but sometimes I will use speech to text on my phone on the writing weeks to get more words quickly while I’m doing housework. 

When I have to edit things get harder but I am doing a lot on my phone right now so I have Grammarly installed on my phone to help me edit on the go. 

I try and brainstorm when I am in the car and I have nothing better to do while I sit passenger. 

This routine doesn’t work all the time and I can’t wait for it to be more consistent so I can really concur my writing but for now this is what I’m left with and that’s okay. 

How I did with my 2021 goals

Back in 2020, I made a list of everything I wanted to achieve by the end of 2021 to do with my writing, and I decided to come back and look at how well I did with my goals. A lot has changed since I made these goals, I spent a lot of 2021 pregnant and then had a baby to care for, so I had to do my best to achieve what I could. the goals I had set were:

1. Finish writing and editing my books from 2020
2. Publish Three books
3. Write 200k by march (June at the latest)
4. write a total of 500k in the year
5. get at least ten sales on Wrongful Love
6. upload at least one blog post a month on writing blog
7. keep twitter and writing page up to date on my work
8. upload twice a month minimum on Wattpad to get more exposure.
9. Make my writing blog more appealing to readers.

I will now go more in-depth over each goal with how I did.

1.) Finish writing and editing my books from 2020: I had started and been working on a lot of books in 2020 and I knew I wouldn't be able to write and edit twelve projects especially since seven were part of different series; so instead I made a list of all the books I did want to finish in 2021 and decided to completely finish my hybrid trilogy (Project Curse, Project Choice and Project Hybrid) I also wanted to finish Project sisters, Project Endo, Project Hope, Project Love and my short story collection.

I was able to finish writing Project Curse, get half way though editing project hybrid and endo and got a few thousand more words on project hope & love.

While trying to finish my short story collection I started to wonder what the rush was; I started that project because every now and then I would get a short story idea and I wanted a place to put them. so I had to decide if I just shared them online or just kept slowly writing stories as they came to me until one day I had enough short stories to publish a whole book. In the end I decided to just wait to write it and instead focus on my other projects. 

2.) Publish Three books: This was going to be one of the hardest ones and I knew it. I had been trying to get my trilogy taken on by an agent since 2020 with no luck and I had no idea how I could publish three books when only one of my projects I had planned to self publish and after the disaster with wrongful love and everything going on in my life that was added stress I didn't want to deal with.

In the end, I decided to scrab this whole goal and instead just focus on my family and writing and editing so that come 2022 I would have more time to try and deal with it.

3.) Write 200k by march (June at the latest): this definitely did not happen. by the end of March, I had managed to write 18,942 words which was way under what I had wanted. up until April, I had been barely writing and I knew there was no way I would manage to write an extra 181,058 words in three months and I was right because at the end of June I had only written a total of 50,000 words.

4.) Write a total of 500k in the year: Because I had failed so badly by the halfway mark I knew I wasn't going to make it to 500k especially since in this last half of the year I would have a baby to look after and my writing was to be put on the back burner. It's not the end of 2021 yet but I don't plan on doing much more writing this year but I did manage to finish the year off with 150,000 words.

5.) Get at least ten sales on Wrongful Love: It's hard to make it as a self-published author no matter how much discounted sales I had on my book, how many hours I spent advertising over the year it seemed impossible to get any sales. by April 15th I hadn't gotten one actual person to buy my book. But by December 31 2021 I had sold three copies of wrongful love and even had a review. 

6.) Upload at least one blog post a month on writing blog: I passed this one with flying colours. I posted a minimum of once a month here on my writing blog and this month alone I will have posted three times by the start of 2022.

7.) Keep twitter and writing page up to date on my work: This I definitely passed. I was keeping twitter and my facebook page updated weekly on what was going on from word sprints to just general parts of my books looking for advice. 

8.) Upload twice a month minimum on Wattpad to get more exposure: I definitely failed at this goal but that was because I slowly started to realize that sometimes the books I think won't make good books for publishing can and will be a good book even as a short story. I still did upload a bit just not as much as I wanted to.

9.) Make my writing blog more appealing to readers: I wasn't sure how I was going to even know I had done this. I made sure I was writing better blog posts which definitely made me feel better about my work but how I was to know if it was more appealing to you guys, the readers.

I decided to look at my 2020 stats and then compare at the end of 2021 to see if views were up which would give me a good idea if people were drawn to my blog more so now than before.

In 2020 I had 0 followers, 0 comments and 624 views across my blog.

In 2021 I had 0 followers, 0 comments and 525 views